If you missed our lawn table event, but you are enrolled with an Ontario physician, contact Beaches Family Practice to request a 5 minute baseline test by Psychology is
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[ Toronto ] How do they come up with this stuff? Whether that’s truth or more likely, fantasy, it hurts, badly. In Siblings Without Rivalry, Adele Faber & Elain Mazlish, nicely reined-in Alfred Adler’s idea that the ‘will to power’ among sibs was always the big deal. — It depends. Then Melitta Schmideberg opened our eyes to the parentified child who gets to be boss, but suffers for it in the end. Most recently, thoughtful minds like Kristin Caspers and her colleagues have been unfolding mysteries of sibling attachment. One reason it’s still a bit of a schmaz is that we haven’t seriously looked at sibs through the lens of their inborn differences; that first layer of personality which we call inborn temperament. Wouldn’t you love to know your child’s inborn layer of personality? Try…

(ONTARIO) From the heart, of course. But so many parent who have lots of heart still struggle with it. Take comfort in the fact that you are in the majority. –A large majority actually, at least in Canada and the U.S. Blame it on technologically focused society, hyper-mobility or the six-day corporate work week, for decades now (at a minimum) most of us have been growing up with overriding, child-parent ‘issues.’ That is: Most of us as parents have our ownattachment

These are typically the big pieces, in how each of us manages the relationship, with each child we have. For most of us, our own uncertainties about ‘how to be’ just plain get in the way.

WHAT? ARE YOU SAYING WE’VE ALL BECOME SELF-ABSORBED PARENTS? No. It would be amazing if every one of us could always feel good about ourselves and…

So how IS a peanut butter and jelly sandwich like mindfulness meditation?

“IT’S NOT!” (…Cue awkward silence . . . )

Okay! But we can imagine! Try this:

Peanut butter is sticky. So is attention. Just like peanut butter sticks to bread, we can stick our attention to anything we need to deal with. If we’re fascinated by something, it’s actually hard to scrape our attention OFF that thing. Like checking someone’s online status that they keep changing all day. Or getting to the next level of a computer game. But if there’s a task we would rather avoid, then we have to dig out LOTS of attention from the jar and glob it onto that nasty task (if only that would make it TASTE better!) until we’re done.

Jelly is floppy. So is relaxation. Ever seen jelly stand straight and tall? Me neither. Sometimes when we first wake up in the morning, we feel just like jelly. All relaxed and peaceful. If we want to get up and do stuff, first we have to stretch and flex, just to un-jellify our muscles.

So let’s say we have two slices of life. (LIFE?) Okay, let’s start with bread. And we want to fill the space between those slices with two things: peanut butter and jelly. It’s a no-brainer that we want good coverage. No big gaps. So we spread the PB evenly and flop the jelly all over. But we try to keep it on the bread. Not just spill globs over the edges. Same with meditation. Simple! Two slices of life, with a bit of time in between. (Time, space, whatever.) We just stick our attention onto ‘right now.’ We try to keep it from spilling over to other times. Most of us love thinking about times that are NOT right now. ‘Right Now’ is the hardest time to think about, in a weird way.

Next, we let our floppy relaxation spread itself, all over the same time-sandwich as our attention.

There’s one other way to explain all this. If you’ve read other stuff about meditation, like the book, Peaceful Piggy, you may have read about letting your breath just do what it ‘wants’ for a while. For most people, the breath is the easiest thing to pay attention to. –Without ‘doing’ anything, that is. It’s a very very old way of just recognizing that right now, you’re giving yourself permission to ditch, on all other times and just pay pure attention to ‘right now.’

So, usually, we don’t even think of full-on attention and full-on relaxation together. Or anyone spreading them all over each other. But here’s the trick. While we’re busy paying attention, we don’t have to actually DO ANYTHING. (WHAT?!) That’s right. Sure, it’s weird to think of paying attention but doing nothing. So it’s not quite totally nothing. Just nothing we have to THINK about doing. That’s where the breath comes in. It’s one of the things that our body CAN pretty automatically. We don’t have to work at it. (Okay, our bodies do other things almost automatically too. But we’re keeping it polite here!

Ever been so tired that you just HAD to do nothing? Maybe it was a ‘good’ kind of tired. Maybe you played a game so hard or got such a big chore done that YOU were done, but you felt oddly relaxed and you just enjoyed soaking up that relaxation. Nothing else was allowed into your mind or body. That feeling is close to what meditation feels like.

‘Noticing’ is an even better word than attention. All we have to do is keep quiet and keep ‘noticing’ what our breath feels like doing, in each moment. It changes a tiny bit, now and then. That’s got the sticky attention part going. What’s cool is that the floppy relaxation part kind of just spreads itself. We just let it.

If we notice some particular tense muscle somewhere, hey, flop some jelly on that part — okay not literally. Just let that part relax, especially. BUT: Just so we don’t fall asleep, we find the most comfortable-but-alert position we can. First time learning this, that might be sitting straight up. It might be in a chair or on a cushion, legs crossed or not. “Is there such a thing as TOO relaxed?” Well, only in meditation. If our PB & J sandwich has one whole jar of jelly in it, we won’t get to taste the normal-size layer of PB.

Same principle here: If we’re TOO relaxed, we can’t pay attention. We just fall asleep. The opposite is kind of disgusting too: A whole jar of peanut butter in your sandwich means you won’t get to taste the normal-size layer of jelly. (Same thing: If we work SO hard at paying attention, there’s NO WAY we can relax.)

‘Breath’ to the rescue. It’s totally enough, just to keep bringing our attention back to the breath. For sure, our attention will sometimes slop over a bit, to other times besides now (things that happened; things we have to do; things we worry will happen) kind of like a puppy that wants to run here and there to explore. We call our attention back gently and kindly, as we would that puppy. . . . Happy breathing!

Yours in health and development,

Ken McCallion, Registered, MA, CPsych Assoc

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Peanut butter is sticky. So is attention. On purpose, we stick our attention to the thing that we focus on. Just like peanut butter sticks to a slice of bread. If we’re fascinated, it’s hard to scrape our attention off that fascinating thing. –Like getting to the next level of a computer game. If it’s a job we would rather avoid, we have to dig out LOTS of attention, to glob onto it, until we’re done.

Jelly is floppy. So is relaxation. Ever seen jelly stand straight and tall? Me neither. Sometimes when we first wake up in the morning, we feel just like jelly, all relaxed and peaceful. If we want…

[TORONTO] We are right to be leery of each and every new psychological term that tries to invade our lives. We’re not about to fall for a repackaging of something we already bought. Nor do we need to live up to some diabolical new yardstick for job performance, school progress or (worst of all) self-worth. And in truth, emotional intelligence (EI) is not new. It is simply a neglected part of ‘intelligence’ itself, even as IQ test-builder David Wechsler defined it, back in 1940. He meant this concept to include all abilities we need, to develop and to achieve, on our own terms. But he never presumed to pack all that into one handy test kit. Others began filling gaps. Today, measures of emotional self awareness, other-awareness and problem-solving are much stronger predictors of school success, career success and social satisfaction than any cognitive

Fitting a full psych-ed assessment into a month of school work can be tricky. Two months, including a Winter break booking, can make a lot of sense. And if your health benefits year renews at New Year’s, double the coverage can reduce your costs to a small fraction of the total.

But the bigger reasons for seeking assessment are the lifetime ones. Getting to the root of the problem means giving the student more durable ways to keep up grade level and permanently improve academic skills.

Accommodations and supports in school or on campus can be a new beginning. And they don’t stop at undergrad. Graduate and professional schools all must provide reasonable accommodations for the student who learns dfferently — yet completely.

WHAT DIFFERENCE WILL IT MAKE?

Individually tuned learning strategies, teaching strategies and, where justified, provincial funding for assistive technologies (laptop and learning support software) can become permanent rights. School support teams get to work. Grades, confidence and graduation rates go up.

WHY HAS MY SCHOOL, UNIVERSITY OR COLLEGE NOT PROVIDED AN ASSESSMENT?

Most educators would like to provide more assessments and learning support. It’s good for the learning environment, the future workforce and the economy. Just ask the successful teachers and professors who now practice with a learning disability and are that much better at teaching, for it. Your school trustee or MPP will be interested in your input, on these issues.

IF GIFTEDNESS AND LEARNING DISABILITY HAD AN ARGUMENT,

NO-ONE WOULD WIN —

And both would wear masks, so they couldn’t be recognized. Bringing them into harmony, so that the student’s strengths shine and he or she copes skillfully with challenges, requires a personalized approach. Teachers of Gifted classes know this. That does not help the student whose giftedness goes unnoticed. Criteria are strict and there is no back door. But students who need both enrichment and support have a distinct profile, which justifies both.

WILL THIS GO ON THE ACADEMIC RECORD?

In a word, “NEVER.” Transcripts do not show the student’s exceptionality. You apply to post-secondary, based on marks alone. If you are already accepted, your university or college must still consider results from a Summer assessment, toward accommodations and learning supports, in all years of study. If you take a university or college course called Learning Strategies or the like, that CAN show up on your transcript, but odds are that it will be surrounded with good-to-excellent marks that put the lie to any notions of limited potential. So unless someone on staff had a liquid lunch, your disability status remains private health information, not for educational documentation.

A December-January assessment can be more relaxed . . .

There are other advantages to assessments that straddle Winter Break:

Less juggling around schoolwork, so the student is often more relaxed and ‘into it.’